Marlon Brando was an Academy Award-winning American actor whose body of work spanned over half a century. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential actors of all time. Brando is best known for his roles as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, both directed by Elia Kazan in the early 1950s, but mostly as his Academy-Award winning performance as Vito Corleone in The Godfather. He also portrayed Colonel Walter Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, the latter two directed by Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970s.